


the gravedigger

by aerynlallaboso



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, revenge.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-24 02:38:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9696020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerynlallaboso/pseuds/aerynlallaboso
Summary: You don't make up for things like that.





	

The gravedigger wakes at midday.

 

Ordinarily he would begin his work at dawn, to take advantage of the few cooler hours before the sun is directly overhead, but it cannot be helped. He spent too long last night writing, committing to paper memories that nobody else alive shares in, that nobody else will ever see. Wallowing, in drink and reminiscence.

 

He heaves his tired bones out of bed, washes and dresses: a red shirt, brown pants, thick boots whose soles are almost worn through. His head will need shaving again soon. He is old, but not prone to the loss of hair that encroaches upon vanity in those of advanced years. He keeps his head shorn short for different reasons. Perhaps practicality; perhaps penance. Nobody has ever asked him.

 

Few come to the gravedigger’s three-roomed shack. There are two chairs at his table out of courtesy, an unconscious desire to pretend that someone might one day seek him out, but he uses only the one. Lunch is bread and butter and tinned redfish from the city, sent out to him with the corpses.

 

He eats quickly. His work will not wait. They come every two days, and today is a delivery day.

 

His house stands on the edge of a cemetery, as natural for a gravedigger, and there is no border between the withered grass that the gravedigger steps out onto from his front door and the cemetery itself. Countless grave markers - there are no proper tombstones here - stretch across a plain baked dry and grey by the heat of a shadeless summer. The great bayside city of Karnaca is at his back, but its shadow misses this graveyard by inches, the silhouettes of its mountain peaks barely grazing his roof when the sun is at its apex.

 

He left his shovel against one of the grave markers when he stopped last night, and now he retrieves it and digs it into the earth. The soil here is as hard as stone, as brittle as honeycomb, and makes slow going. There will be enough graves for the bodies he expects today only because he puts his back into every hole he digs, ignoring the knots that form, ignoring his arms begging him for mercy as night approaches. He has practice in turning the other cheek to such pleas.

 

This row is almost finished. Eight holes, of equal shape and size - he does not tailor his graves to the subject. If it were not for him, most of the people who are buried here would have their corpses burnt in pits or left for the bloodflies. Grand Guard and petty criminals alike come to their final rest here, alongside poor civilians, disenfranchised nobles, stillborn babies. They all fit in the same length and width of hole.

 

The gravedigger wipes sweat away from his brow, from the scar that dominates his cheek. It is a principle that has governed his life from childhood until the present, that death makes all equal. He finds it comforting and depressing in similar measure.

 

Clattering. The wagon is coming.

 

He does not lift his head from the ground until the grave he is digging is the right dimensions, so he does not turn around and see the corpse-wagon making its way up the road until it has nearly reached the cemetery. The wagon is the same as always, painted a worn black, the horses chestnut and bay and tiring quickly under the pitiless Serkonan sun. Arms and legs spill from under a sheet designed at once to give the dead an illusion of privacy and to trap the smell of flesh beginning to rot underneath it. It does not always work.

 

The wagon’s driver is different. The gravedigger lets his shovel slip from his sweaty hands as he watches her bring the horses to a stop. She is looking at him, too, although she lets her gaze wander while she disembarks, over his shack, over the acres of the dead.

 

She pulls her scarf down from her face. From a distance, she is the black-and-white pencil sketch he once saw on every wall in a city, a dead woman peering over her shoulder with accusing eyes and a hard mouth whose face followed him everywhere he went, even into his nightmares.

 

He blinks. Colour returns to her cheeks and her lips, and to her eyes. They are not her mother’s, after all, but her father’s, seen in the light and not through faceted glass. She is walking towards the shack.

 

The gravedigger meets her in his kitchen. His second chair is finally in use: she has taken it without prompting. He sits on the other, heavily.

 

“So,” says the gravedigger. He clears his throat; he has not used his voice in some time and the rasp in it is even more marked than usual, from age, from breathing in corpse-dust. “You finally found me.”

 

“Give me a reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now,” his guest says. To a superficial eye, she might seem composed. She holds herself well, as Empresses are taught to do, but her mouth is trembling. Her fingers curl into each other, search for comfort in the rounded hilt of a blade, of which he knows she has more than one.

 

He laughs. “I don’t have one.”

 

“Give me a reason why my father didn’t kill you, then. When he had the chance.”

 

“He…” The gravedigger draws back, interested. “He told you he did. Unexpected. But then, your father always was one for throwing off expectations.” There is a black wrap around her left hand. He does not have to see what is underneath it to know that it is there, like a sac of blowfly eggs laid in a chimney, ready to burst into ugly, blood-tinted flames if a spark is lit.

 

He almost cannot connect the young woman before him with the girl he kidnapped a very, very long time ago. She is her mother and father at once, staring him down in his own kitchen and saying, “You don’t know, do you?”

 

“I have some ideas.”

 

“Some ideas,” she repeats.

 

“I’ve had a long time to think, living out here.”

 

She looks around the shack, out the still open door, as if she has never considered up until this moment that he lives here. It must be repulsively foreign to her, he amuses himself by thinking. Four wooden walls, tinned food, no company except for the decaying hundreds out in the field. “Why did you choose this place?”

 

“I was born in Serkonos. The history books say that much.”

 

“But why _here_ ,” she persists. “My father gave you your life. Once you left Dunwall, you could’ve gone anywhere. You could’ve lived in Karnaca or one of the other cities if you wanted to. There are people who would be more than willing to harbour the former Knife of Dunwall. I’ve met some of them. Do you think you’re - making up for it, with this?”

 

He shrugs.

 

“Do you think you could ever make up for it?”

 

He wishes he had a pipe. “You don’t make up for things like that.”

 

“At least you know that much,” she says, and he can hear the hatred in her voice, simmering, boiling. “I think I see why my father spared your life after all.”

 

“Enlighten me.”

 

If he had a clock in this tiny shack he lived in, it would’ve ticked out the time between his words and hers, but he doesn’t, so there is a long silence before she says, “You’re pathetic.”

 

The insult insinuates itself between the lines in his forehead and makes his temples ache, his teeth grit out of half-remembered anger. He does not have the energy to properly retort, or to defend himself. It isn’t as if she’s wrong.

 

“What are you doing in Serkonos?” he asks her when she makes no move to punctuate her answer.

 

“There was a coup. A woman claiming to be my - my aunt.” Not _my mother’s sister_ , not in front of him. She has not mentioned her mother once and he expects that she would kill him immediately if he did. “You really live so far away from everything that you’ve not heard of our new Empress Delilah?”

 

He did not think he could be surprised any longer, living the life of a gravedigger, a man who toils in the earth from dawn to dusk and has no break to his monotonous routines. He is surprised by this, and she sees it. “You have heard of her.”

 

“It’s not my problem anymore,” he tells her, though his hands are gripping the sides of his chair so hard he feels one might break, either the chair or his hands. To have the last and most challenging problem he ever put down thrown back in his face like this is worse than the mere implications that her visit brings with her. After all, he has known for years how this will end.

 

She says, “No. It’s mine, and I can solve it without your help.”

 

“I wasn’t offering it.”

 

The gravedigger and his visitor sit. The horses outside whinny and snort, attached to a lump of flesh that grows more fragrant the longer it lies in the sun. He has the prickling urge to get up from his chair and go out there to unload the wagon, to get all the bodies into their holes so he can least have a layer of topsoil over them before it grows dark.

 

“Nothing else to say to me?”

 

“What else would I want to say to you?” she says. “You ruined my life. You destroyed my family. You took me from my home. There isn’t anything else to be said.”

 

He runs his thumb over his scar. She rises from her chair, and he does the same, hoping against even his own hope that she will go, get back in the wagon and drive back to Karnaca, leave him to his digging and his writing and his remembering. She sets her mouth; he knows it for a last wish.

 

“I knew one of you would come for me eventually,” he says. “I’m not going to stop you.”

 

His mouth and his mind say that, but his hand flexes as she draws her sword, going for a weapon that he no longer carries on his person. Gravediggers have no enemies, no reasons to sleep with a knife under their pillow. He has shed the habit as he shed his memories, by picking up a pen instead.

 

Her sword flashes. It lops off his hand cleanly, shockingly, so fast it does not even hurt. He stares at the end of his wrist and flashes her a wry smile. “Reflex.”

 

“Me too,” she says. It brings to mind days and people long past, when he had things worth teaching and students who wanted to learn. She is not like any of them; she is better. A knife sharpened inadvertently by his own steel has surpassed any he honed intentionally, and as she runs him through, he feels nothing for her, just as she feels nothing but hatred for him.

 

Her blade passes through his ribcage like butter. _It_ glows on her hand contemptuously.

 

Flies buzz. His blood drips onto the floor of his shack, resoundingly loud, in time to his heartbeat thrumming out its last beats.

 

Gradually, the gravedigger’s black eyes cloud over and close. A final breath escapes his mouth; his guest, the Empress of the Isles and the child whose mother he murdered, withdraws her sword soundlessly and watches his body collapse to the ground in stages - first his legs go out from under him, then his torso catches up with him until he is a posable mannequin, a puppet discarded on the floor.

 

She has imagined this moment many times. As with many things in life, it is not the same, but it is something. She uses her sword to prod him into a semblance of sleep, unwilling to touch him until she is completely sure that all life has left him.

 

While she waits for that unspecified moment, she searches the shack. Its three rooms contain only minor and expected possessions: dishes in the kitchen, folded clothes and a volume on Serkonan entomology in the bedroom, a razor in the bathroom. The gravedigger’s journal and inkwell are in a cupboard under the sink. She pockets the journal.

 

The gravedigger lies on the floor in the kitchen. In life, in youth, he wore a red jacket to hide the blood of his enemies; in death and decay, the red shirt he wears hides his own blood well enough. The stump of his hand oozes. It forms a pattern on the floorboards that might, by some stretch of the imagination, resemble the striking tattoo on the severed hand itself.

 

She returns to the kitchen. The pattern has dissolved into a meaningless pool of blood; a fly lands in it. She takes it as the sign she has been watching for, and stoops, tumbles the gravedigger’s body over her shoulder. The hand she takes by a leathery fingertip, though she would rather leave it where it has fallen. It seems wrong, however, to leave any part of him unburied, out in the open. Hands can be dried and hexed and turned into powerful charms, if one knows how.

 

Eight holes are open in the graveyard. She picks one at random and throws the gravedigger into it, then his hand. Then his journal. She takes his shovel from the ground and buries him in enough earth that she can see nothing of him, that she can know that he is _gone_.

 

There are too many bodies for the other holes. She opens the back of the wagon, lets them roll out onto the flat ground. Let the flies have them. The day after tomorrow, someone else will come and discover what she has done, and then someone else will come and live in the gravedigger’s shack. Or perhaps nobody. She likes that idea. This graveyard, this house, forgotten, somewhere behind the mountains of Karnaca. As he deserves.

 

She mounts the wagon, clicks her tongue at the horses. They begin ambling back towards the path to Karnaca, then trotting, kicking up a cloud of dust that would obscure the gravedigger’s final resting place from her view, if she bothered to look behind her. She does not. There is business she must attend to in the city.


End file.
